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“Juan Williams, NPR and the Death of Liberalism”

Here’s a bulletin, NPR: Lots and lots and lots of Americans feel the same way as Juan Williams. And that includes lots and lots of liberals. And probably a lot of liberals who work at NPR. Juan’s “crime” wasn’t that he said something bigoted. His crime is that he said something that liberals find politically incorrect. And that he said it out loud. And worst of all, that he said it on the Fox News Channel.

In liberal circles this is nothing less than a crime against humanity!

What makes this so crazy — and so sad — is that liberals are the open-minded ones, the ones who cherish the free exchange of ideas, the smart ones. And if you don’t believe me, just ask any liberal, who will be glad to tell you how smart and open-minded he or she is. But these are the kind of people who believe in “free speech” only as long as they agree with you.

I feel bad for Juan, He’s a good, decent man. His firing will make lots of other Americans think twice before they say something the boss may not like. And that’s not a good thing in a democracy that thrives on vibrant, sometimes controversial ideas.

But I feel worse for American liberals. Because what we have here is one more piece of evidence that too many of them have forgotten how to be liberal.

Only about 20 percent of Americans identify themselves as liberals. Liberalism was once a great American movement. It led the fight for civil rights, the most important issue, as far as I’m concerned, of the 20th century.

It’s a shame that liberalism is dying in this country. It’s an outright crime that liberals are killing it.

One suspects Goldberg’s feigned wonderment here is merely a rhetorical ploy — and that he, as well as every reader who’s visited this site with any degree of regularity, knows that what is now labeled “liberalism” hasn’t been liberalism since the New Left’s coup to take over the Democrat party.

Remember: the New Left hated the term liberalism at one time; it wasn’t until they changed their strategy — take over the Democrat party by pretending to take on its identity, and changing it from within — that they ever embraced “liberalism” as a label.

Yet label or no, it has been clear to anyone who pays attention that the self-styled liberals — and even those who mistakenly followed these new “liberals” out of habit, believing them the same liberal Democrats they’d always followed — no longer support actual liberal policy.

When I call myself a classical liberal, I’m reminding people that what liberalism really is is different than what it has now supposedly become under the label’s new stewards.

“Tolerance,” as a concept, has been inverted to punish actual tolerance — and instead has instituted de facto civic speech codes; in many of our academies, supposedly institutions dedicated to unbridled intellectualism, the “liberal” faculty and administrators have created out of the way zones for “free speech,” in effect admitting that the rest of the campus is not protected under the First Amendment (and of course, some of the faculty have even tried to ostracize those with whom they have political disagreements); the idea of a color-blind society, where equality of opportunity and equal protection under the laws is held to be the goal, has been reformulated as “racist,” with those who agitate for legal distinctions and set asides for certain protected identity groups pretending to champion civil rights; and on and on and on.

“Liberalism” in this country, where it truly exists, has migrated — as I did — to the right side of the political aisle. True liberals — classical liberals, today’s libertarians and legal conservatives — are depicted as “extremists,” nutty uneducated hicks who aren’t quite sophisticated enough to be forcing their silly prole snouts into big boy politics.

But when the left — under the guise of liberalism — begins calling 70% of the population “extremists” (be it for protesting a mosque or for insisting that Arizona has a right to defend themselves if the federal government won’t), simple math suggests that it is they who are extremists.

And a simple review of what classical liberalism embraces and instructs suggests that it is they who are the phony liberals.

(h/t JHo)

****related: Williams fired by phone, not given opportunity to defend himself.

Judging from his conversations with Bill-O, I think Williams has recognized for some time that the nutroots and far-left have hijacked the Democratic party; have moved it faaaaaaar out of the “mainstream”. In fact, he has often mentioned all of the hate-mail he gets from Kos kiddies et al for daring to be critical of them, their methods, or their messiah…

I’m with DR @2, and wonder if now Williams will be even more outspoken on that hijacking, and the inherent intolerance of the supposed champions of tolerance…

At least he’s not a female military SF writer with solely female protagonists, who hates hates hates the tea baggers and all the other selfish haters on the right, but happened to also express the tiniest bit of apprehension about the motives of the Ground Zero Mosque…

(So what stage of the Weimar Republic have we reached? Or are we following a different model? I recall the left requiring self-denunciation sessions in California a few years ago; maybe we’re going down the Maoist path instead.)

So Juan Williams expresses a concern/ opinion the vast majority of Americans feel, and then, in the full context of that O’Reilly segment (which NPR ignored or didn’t bother to watch) says it is highly important to distinguish between the average Muslim and the Islamofacists in which Mary Katherine Ham (also on the panel) agrees.

NPR then fires him for “editorial standards” which is code for, “You’re now a bigot. And also your comments might have slighted or offended some members of the religion of peace, which may possibly cause them to blow up our building if we don’t fire you immediately in a disrespectful manner”.

Williams crime is breaking is NPR vow of poverty. Liasson has done that too.

This is NPR infighting pure and simple. They have been biding their time trying to get rid of both of them. How dare they take Fox News money. That is dirty money. Bad money. They are using their NPR credentials to bolster Fox News, for filthy filthy lucre. Money is only good for taxes, for government programs, to do good.

At least he’s not a female military SF writer with solely female protagonists, who hates hates hates the tea baggers and all the other selfish haters on the right, but happened to also express the tiniest bit of apprehension about the motives of the Ground Zero Mosque…

Have a link for that, Rob? I can’t find where it was posted in the comments here.

Jeff, the lady’s name is Elizabeth Moon. Professor Reynolds has a good breakdown with links. It’s not something you’d be likely to have on your radar; I don’t recall you showing a taste for science fiction.

You’ll love it, Jeff. Bunch of feminist science fiction fans throwing a hissy fit and getting the preeminent female SF author disinvited from their con for insufficient purity. Because science fiction feminism is such a large tent, they can afford to purge the impure.

The frustrating thing, in this as in so many similar situations, is that the blinkered idiots in charge are so convinced of their rightness that they can’t acknowledge just how blinkered they are. Drives me nuts when idiots are convinced of their superior wisdom…

A lot of that case may very well be utterly opaque unless you’re a fan and/or consumer of science fiction, in fact of a fairly limited subset of science fiction. Those who are interested and have the resources to catch up should begin with the trilogy Deed of Paksennarion: Sheepfarmer’s Daughter, Divided Allegiance, and Oath of Gold. That was her “breakout”, and a spectacular breakout it was. If you read them, see if you can spot the utterly untenable basic assumption that the story is built on (with spectacular success, by the way) and that makes these recent events so amusingly ironic.

this one became a missionary after they broke up – not a marine – but I might read Moon’s stuff – I got caught at Border’s last weekend looking for something and not knowing any of the authors – I wish Mr. Instapundit would make it easy to pull up that sci-fi stuff he comments about by category

Here you go, an Elizabeth Moon bibliography. I didn’t get caught up in Sassinak/Planet Pirates for some reason, but was as impressed as everybody else with Deed of Paksennarion. The ones I’ve liked best are Heris Serrano/Familias Regnant (6 books, although it sort of peters out in the middle of Book 5) and Vatta’s War. I haven’t seen the new one yet, and will probably wait until most or all of the series is available — she tends to do the kind of thing that makes me, at least, anxious to see what happens next, and waiting a year for the next episode doesn’t work any more.

Actually, Ric, the curious thing is Moon’s hostility towards the Tea Parties, given the “prequels” she wrote for the Paksenarrion books. Now, the Tea Parties aren’t led by a literal saint like Gird, but COME ON!

I read the Vatta’s War series. Good stuff, fun read. The Speed Of Dark is a very interesting book, too, I highly recommend it. It’s written from the point of view of an autistic man and gives some interesting insights (IIRC, Moon has an autistic son).

I remember that I read Paksenarrion in the early nineties, but couldn’t tell you what it was that I read to save my life. Something vaguely Grrrl Power!-ish fantasy fic wasn’t it? I think it had a Larry Elmore painting on the cover.

I don’t feel bad about the death of the liberal movement, I just feel bad about its overall affects on society. Liberalism was always a compromised movement, infiltrated by too many unsavory characters with duplicitous aims and objectives. Its fall was therefore a foregone conclusion.

It’s weird that they trot out such a transparent beard for his firing.
Williams has been a regular, compensated analyst at Fox News since 04-05. I remember seeing him always taking smoke breaks outside the building when I worked there. He’s actually a really nice guy.

In his job, all he did was take positions, usually seeking some sort of Clintonian centrist Dem position. He stopped being a reporter years ago. The guy was a columnist at WaPo….what did they think what he wrote was? Did they think he was spending hours doing what I do–poring over documents, negotiating with lawyers and PR sorts, casting nets and making hundreds of calls?

Come on.

The part of the statement that rings most true is where the President said that his statement shocked some people at NPR. The admission of differences, material ones, from a person in his seat that would in a plain reading seem to buttress the traditionalist concern over Islam is more than the traffic will bear for them.

Sharper lefties will compare this to what happened to Frum at AEI. I dunno. Frum gradually became disinterested in classic conservatism; Williams admitted that he sometimes gets nervous after 9-11 and Richard Reid and that other guy who tried to blow up the flight from Amsterdam recently and….

As a point of interest in terms of the intolerance displayed by NPR President and CEO Schiller, it is perhaps worth noting that — yes indeed — Schiller comes about her intolerance for free speech honestly.

Ms. Schiller, it seems, had a fascination with the Russian language. Which led her to the Soviet Union after college, which led in turn to a job as a tour guide, which led to work on the documentary version of Turner’s Portrait of the Soviet Union.

Schiller was not a creative force on the film, she was simply using her Russian skills to help the Turner people get around the country. But it is interesting that a career that has blossomed in the hallowed halls of the notoriously intolerant American left-wing media began in one of the most infamously intolerant civilizations on earth — where Schiller was hired to work on what became a stunningly rose-colored look at the Communist tyranny.

Don’t take my word for it.

John Corry of the New York Times — that’s right, the New York Times –panned the film that Schiller helped facilitate. “History disappears down the memory hole in ‘Portrait of the Soviet Union,'”said Corry in his opening line of a scorching review that appeared in the Times on March 20, 1988.

The film said, said Corry caustically (Corry was the rare conservative at the Times), tells us: “The Soviet spirit just works wonders. From Moscow to Azerbaijan to deep in frozen Siberia, no one even frowns.”

Narrated by the late liberal actor Roy Scheider of Jaws fame, the Soviet Union is presented as — no kidding — the “place of tomorrow.”

That follows, as you’ll see below, her comment earlier today that now-former NPR news analyst Juan Williams should have kept his feelings about Muslims between himself and “his psychiatrist or his publicist.”

It was ironic that Williams’ firing came on the day that the 1991 controversy over then-Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas’ conduct toward law professor Anita Hill returned to the news. It was reported that Thomas’ wife asked Hill to retract her sexual harassment allegations against Thomas.

Williams was a friend of Thomas and defended him then in a chain of events that ultimately contributed to Williams’ departure from the Post. He wrote on the Post’s op-ed page that Hill had “no credible evidence” for her allegations of sexual harassment by Thomas, writing that Hill was “prompted” to make her charges by Democratic Senate staffers.*

the conflation with Mr. Thomas is a good reminder for black guys to keep in mind that if you give NPR even a hint your black ass has a trace of conservative sympathies they will
fuck
you
up

#33 …which led to work on the documentary version of Turner’s Portrait of the Soviet Union. I remember when that came out. It featured drivel like “Once the Kremlin was the home of czars. Today it belongs to the people”. It was televised in Gorbachev-era Russia, but the Sovs added a disclaimer saying that it painted too rosy a picture of the Soviet Union. Plus royaliste quand le roi, indeed.

In the 16 years Nina Totenberg has been NPR’s legal affairs correspondent, she has built a reputation as a savvy and tenacious reporter. For most of that time, however, she remained largely unknown outside of the relatively small circle of fellow journalists and dedicated NPR listeners.

That is, until October [1991], when her disclosure of sexual harassment charges against Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas–followed by a heated exchange with Sen. Alan Simpson–catapulted Totenberg to national prominence.

Totenberg’s Thomas report came after the nominee’s initial hearings had concluded without a major hitch, when it appeared he would easily win Senate confirmation. Two days before the Senate Judiciary Committee vote, Totenberg broke the story on Morning Edition that Anita Hill had told the committee that she had been sexually harassed while working for Thomas in two federal agencies. Although a Newsday reporter had similar information, Hill’s interview with Totenberg was her first contact with the press.*

remember earlier in that link Jeff had in #37 where we learned that…NPR expects its journalists to steer clear of situations that might call its impartiality into question?

Keep that in mind as you read through NPR’s impartial look at the Klein/West race in Florida. See if you can figure out which candidate is a big scary conservative negro.

From Florida’s 22nd congressional district just north of Miami, NPR’s Greg Allen says the battle between incumbent Democratic Rep. Ron Klein and Tea Party/Republican Allen West is a tight race. West is “one of the election season’s more fiery candidates,” Greg reports.

A former Army lieutenant colonel who was forced to retire after an incident in Iraq when he fired a gun near a detainee’s head, West says it’s time to fight back “against a tyrannical government.” Klein has responded that West is an extremist.

They’ve traded jabs over an IRS lien against West, which Klein says is a sign that the Republican has “the wrong values for South Florida.” West says the problem built up while he was serving in Afghanistan and that if Klein “wants to attack my wife who was back here trying to maintain a household with our two daughters while I was over protecting him, that’s where I have a problem.”

Nina’s interview with Hill broke on a Sat. morning, I happened to hear it on my way to a meeting with Bill Kennard who was at that time Deputy to Clinton’s FCC chair Reed Hundt, and became Hundt’s successor a few years later. Kennard and his wife, who was a high ranking corporate lawyer with Mobil were both law school classmates and friends with Anita Hill. I told Bill about the claim Hill was making and watched his eyes bug out in shock at the news. He called his wife in telling the story to her with the same result, whereupon they both entered a cascade of phone calls to other members of their law school class. Hilarious couple of hours that was, watching the grapevine work.

Kennard was a high school chum of my housemate the Armenian fella from LA. Roland put us together since Kennard wanted to renovate his basement.

Couple of sheepshead keepers, couple of smallish crevalle jacks (throwbacks) and an unmerciful shitload of ladyfish while we were hoping to take speckled sea trout on spoons. Otherwise, just a nice day on the bulkheads. Think we’ll give Matlacha Pass a go tomorrow.

Nice,
The wife and I were visiting Montauk at the far eastern end of Long Island for a few days earlier this week. I didn;t do any fishing myself while I was there, but while walking the seawall around the famous lighthouse at Montauk point, I saw dudes pullin’ some HUGE! striped bass. Those suckers were 2 to 3 feet long and had to weigh 20 pounds.

They must be runnin’ or something this time of year, because throughout the day you could see the surface of the ocean teeming with activity close to shore.

Stripers are some kind of tasty. Back in my fish cutting days I used to deal with big old females just as you’ve described. Ummm baby, are they good. I wouldn’t eat a puffer I don’t think, too small to deal with really, even if we could catch ’em, which we can’t.

Sdferr, somehow I never caught on that was your part of Florida. That’s where all of my wife’s family is. We were just down their last week for a couple days visiting her brother in Cape Coral, took the kids out to that little ‘beach’ on the Caloosahatchee, at the end of Driftwood Parkway. My three year old and I spent a couple hours watching a girl cast net a bunch of bait fish then lose them to puffers at the end of the jetty.

Geoff, yes Florida puffers are members of that group; same as the ones infamous for their purported use in Haitian voodoo.

Never really heard of any problems from them though, nobody eats them. Back when I lived in Florida, aside from bad oysters, the most common problem was ciguatera toxicity from the occasional ‘old timer’ who still ate barracuda.

Although apparently there are some recent reports of stonefish moving into the Gulf of Mexico, and that was quite the topic while we were down in Florida.

I read and liked the Paksennarrion series. She’s in the process of writing a second trilogy that literally starts where the first one ended. The first volume, Oath of Fealty, is out. I think the second one is due in March of next year.

Geek alert: If you read the section of book 2 dealing with the town of Brewersbridge, you will quickly realize that it was lifted pretty much whole (names changed to protect the guilty, but population, village geography, and plot elements identical) from the classic D&D module, T1 Village of Hommlet. Even Gird is a thinly disguised St Cuthbert.

Thanks guys. I’d only heard of them as part of the famous “fugu” cuisine experience.

Hmmm.

It is not believed that puffers produce toxins themselves, as puffer fish kept in tanks or fish farms are totally free of either toxin. The gastric contents of shellfish prey are believed to carry the toxins or their precursors, which are stored in the puffers organs.

It is bad news, like a blow to the solar plexus. One good thing though, BJTex lives near Philly, which has very good resources in treatments and possibly good trials going on, either at Penn or at Thomas Jefferson.

Prognosis
The median survival time from the time of diagnosis without any treatment is 3 months, but with treatment survival of 1–2 years is common. Increasing age (> 60 years of age) carries a worse prognostic risk. Death is usually due to cerebral edema or increased intracranial pressure.[39]

A good initial Karnofsky Performance Score (KPS), and MGMT methylation are associated with longer survival.[39] A DNA test can be conducted on glioblastomas to determine whether or not the promoter of the MGMT gene is methylated. Patients with a methylated MGMT promoter have been associated with significantly greater long-term benefit than patients with an unmethylated MGMT promoter.[40] This DNA characteristic is intrinsic to the patient and currently cannot be altered externally.

Long-term benefits have also been associated with those patients who receive surgery, radiotherapy, and temozolomide chemotherapy.[39] However, much remains unknown about why some patients survive longer with glioblastoma. Age of under 50 is linked to longer survival in glioblastoma multiforme, as is 98%+ resection and use of temozolomide chemotherapy and better Karnofsky performance scores.

UCLA Neuro-Oncology publishes real-time survival data for patients with this diagnosis.[41] They are the only institution in the United States that shows how their patients are performing. They also show a listing of chemotherapy agents used to treat GBM tumors.

According to a 2003 study, glioblastoma multiforme prognosis can be divided into three subgroups dependent on KPS, the age of the patient, and treatment.[42]

To the fisherpeople above: Please take a minute to read up on the Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) that are closing off huge areas of California coast (and around the world) to fishing by citizens. The MPA movement is massively funded by non profit foundations and Julie Packard and created by non-elected and non_answerable bodies. Fishing is a right guaranteed under the California constitution. Already commercial fishing boats — small, one- person businesses — are tracked with sensors attached, like ankle bracelets on felons. If they drift near an MPA, a govt helicopter hovers oveerhead and orders the boat to move. Check it out. A joy coming soon to your waters?

My neighbor is still alive 8 years out, but his doctors think it’s resurgent. May God bless all those afflicted, and grace their families with the strength and comfort they need, and may He heal those suffering, either by His hand or through the skill He graces their caregivers with.

It’s important to add that the MPA sections of ocean and beach now (and more to come) off limits to the public are healthy, well-managed and not over-fished. The immigrant person from central LA who fishes off a pier for his family’s protein will have to find another ocean.

Statistics are what they are, averages of previous outcomes. Individuals can do amazing things. I believe that one must believe in a good outcome. People are hard to kill, but when one is on the cusp of failure, the will to continue can make a difference.

As far as medicine has come, there’s a long way ahead and a lot we don’t know. We can guess at causes and try solutions and stick with what works, but there are still miracles that remain unexplained. Let this time be one of those times.

Anyone who has run a business knows why Juan Williams was fired. Prior to the final straw statement, he was warned numerous times about expresssing his personal feelings because his job was to be a reporter. When he interviews a person of Muslim faith, the story will be about Juan Williams and not his assignment. He simply cannot do his job. Further when covering the NYC terrorist trial he repeated misquoted the word “flood” as “blood” to make his personal points instead of covering the event. Fox makes a statement that bias and bigotry are OK for Fox. A business that employs real reporters cannot employ someone who behaves in this way.

Totenberg and Fiore and Liasson could not be reached for comment. This journalistic “ethics” claim is profoundly mendoucheous. It is insulting to any sentient being’s intelligence, and prolly insulting to tubers as well. The MFLM has no ethics.

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